This document discusses the history of early digital games and computers. It then describes a case study of a company called Additron Games that has developed a new games engine. Additron Games is proposing to use Kubernetes and container orchestration to automate the provisioning of their platform on public and private clouds, as well as low-end devices. This would help meet their business needs of scaling globally while controlling costs and launching a new offline console product.

1. Building a retro-games machine
with Javascript and Kubernetes

2. HISTORY

3. ● Award-winning Canadian engineer and computer pioneer
and Chair of Science Council of Canada
● Named of Order of Canada in 2011
● Created the world’s first computerized traffic control
system
● In 2014, at the age of 93, proposed an improvement for
Toronto Transit Commission subway system
● Invented the first digital game playing machine:
Bertie the Brain
Joseph Kates
Joseph Kates (1921 / 2018)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Kates

5. ● The four meter tall computer allowed exhibition
attendees to play a game of tic-tac-toe against an
artificial intelligence
● Based on a new revolutionary vacuum-tube
technology, the Additron, allowing computers
to be 10 times smaller
● The difficulty of the game was adjustable
● The machine was disassembled at the end of the
exhibition and largely forgotten as a curiosity
Joseph Kates
Bertie the Brain - 1950
Canadian National Exhibition
Danny Kaye wins a game of tic-tac-toe against Bertie the Brain in 1950.
BERNARD HOFFMAN/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES

6. Video games timeline
1952
OXO - EDSAC computer
1971
First COIN-OP
Galaxy Game
1950
Bertie the Brain
1951
Nimrod
1972
Pong
1972
Magnavox Odyssey
First home video game console

7. IBM PC GAMING

8. ● Released on 12 August 1981 - 39 years ago
● Support multiple operating systems: CP/M-86, UCSD
p-System, and an in-house product called IBM PC DOS,
developed by Microsoft.
● Built in just 12 months development with a joint effort of
designers, engineers and computer hobbyists who helped to
shape the open architecture.
● Because none of the functional components were designed by
IBM, they obtained no patents on the PC.
● In December 1991, Computer Gaming World reported that DOS
accounted for 82% of computer-game sales.
IBM PC COMPATIBLE ERA
IBM 5151 IBM x86 personal computer
Intel 8088

9. Olivetti M24
Released in 1983
Intel 8086 10 128 KB RAM
the most sold machine
1986 Olivetti also
became the third largest PC
manufacturer worldwide

11. CASE STUDY

12. Additron Games ™

13. We have developed a new revolutionary
games engine, capable to play retro games
10x times better than before.
Our users can play using a standard web
browser, reaching unleashed audio/video
performance.Additron Games

14. Due to increase of platform popularity we
need scale to a global footprint, keeping the
costs under control.
We are also planning to launch a new
product, which is an entry-level console
with preinstalled games, it should work
offline, must be self-healing and it will be
cheap for us and our customers.
Business
requirement

15. Technical
requirement
Our platform is Linux based and has a lot of
moving parts to orchestrate
We spend a lot of time to provision new
public/private cloud instances of the
platform, which is done with custom scripts
We have some APIs to manage the platform
but it is almost legacy and complicated to
maintain
We don't have experience on installing our
platform on SoC devices, like Raspberry PIs.

17. OUR PROPOSAL

18. Technical
requirements
● Automated provisioning of platform and
games
● API-first platform
● It works offline
● Autoscaling - Self healing
● It works on low-end devices
● It can be installed on public/private cloud

24. ● Container orchestration platform + networking
● CRD (Custom Resources Definition) is a powerful feature
which enables users to add their own/custom objects to
the Kubernetes cluster and use it like any other native
Kubernetes objects
● Configmap: API object used to store non-confidential data
in key-value pairs with a maximum capacity of 1MB
● K3S: Lightweight and fully compliant Kubernetes. Easy to
install, half the memory, all in a binary of less than 100 MB.
Kubernetes API
Kubernetes

25. GAME CRD

28. DEMO TIME